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With the “subtle ironies” dial at zero and “tremulous intensity” on max, Hagon powers through this strange tale of a sensitive young man who grows up to be a blowhard novelist in the “great American writer” mode, haunted since boyhood by an series of unsolved child murders in his rural Georgian home town. Don’t be fooled by the praise on the jacket from the crime writer Michael Connolly: even for the Deep South in the mid-20th century, the detection and forensics are implausibly lax, leaving our hero to a lifetime of agonising and intuiting until he finally works out whodunnit. As a general rule, a well-honed abridgement can turn a potboiler into an enjoyable entertainment, but this is still a heavy-handed treatment of a profoundly disturbing topic. I’m left wondering why it was worthy of a Richard & Judy endorsement.

A QUIET BELIEF IN ANGELS by RJ Ellory, read by Garrick Hagon
(Orion £14.99, 7 hrs 50 mins, abridged)

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